New X Proposal on Freedesktop.org

Bytal writes "Havoc Pennington (of Red Hat and GNOME fame) seems to have a very interesting entry in his blog on the development of a new extension to the venerable X server going on at freedesktop.org. More specifically it seems to provide for most things that people have clamoring for (alpha blending, flicker-free window compositing and switching, as well as even OpenGL integration) without altering the existing X protocol too much."

Comments

Re:Extra Memory Usage

[julesh]

Most peopole who want to run the flashy stuff have pc's equipped to handle it.

Yes, but they're not talking about 'the flashy stuff'. They're talking about modifications to X that would use up this memory whether or not you actually want to use the features that it makes available.

My main problem with this is that there are better ways of achieving the same results. I run Win2K on a system with only 16Mb of video RAM, and it's quite happy to do alpha blending and compositing for large windows without issue or flicker... so why can't these developers come up with a scheme that would work as well as that one?

Please, let's get off of X already

[Overly Critical Guy]

I'm sick of add-ons and modifications to this ancient protocol. Can we please create a modern GUI protocol to allow us a modern desktop environment? Why are so many Linux users afraid of change?

XFree86 is HUGE and complicated. Too many libraries and conflicting interfaces and generally poor performance litter its userspace. When this is brought up, every X defender blames the windowing libraries and desktop environments. Look, it's 2003, can we please move beyond the 1998 era of Linux desktops and have something new and modern?